It was instant, and it was visceral!
The second I clicked on the link in my office on Saturday night, there it was: a picture of missing St. John’s University student Joshua Guimond from November 2002 flyers that had been plastered around Collegeville and St. Joseph for years after his disappearance (and rightly so).
I began to shake and cry uncontrollably; the nausea was awful. I tried to scream, mouth wide open! Nothing came out. I couldn’t breathe! What in the world was happening to me?
The technical term, according to the psychological criteria, is post-traumatic stress disorder; the layperson’s term is PTSD. A trigger event, to be specific.
Let me explain:
By November 2002, I had lived in St. Joseph raising my child as a single mother for just shy of 3.5 years. In May 2002, my kid and I walked across the graduation stage at the College of St. Benedict together and accepted my bachelor’s degree. Less than six months later, Joshua was missing.
At the time, I was the single mother of an elementary school age child, a child who was still appropriately innocent and safe. At that moment I couldn’t imagine things any other way…
Then, my reptilian brain kicked in! Like parents and survivors before me, instinct was all my brain and body understood. I walled off the terror and the agonizing worry and the repeated realization that control is an illusion; I sealed it off, all of it.
You see, my child possessed an excellent BS detector. I couldn’t implement boundaries I thought were going to ensure safety via a body language of fear. My kid would sense the dissonance. I needed to be rock steady, so away it went.
The intervening 20 years seem to have impossibly passed. Yet my body remembered, and on an ordinary Saturday evening, picture on my screen, it released the terror, the helplessness, the grief I could not afford to experience until now.
There are still no definitive answers in Joshua’s disappearance, but there is hope.
Josh Newville, a civil rights lawyer in Minneapolis, has recently published a podcast entitled, “Simply Vanished.” (simplyvanished.com). The first season focuses on Joshua’s case.
Patty Wetterling asked readers to listen to Newville’s podcast in her July 8 Letter to the Editor in this paper. So I did.
It is worth the listen.
I cannot do much to impact the outcome of the investigation, but there are people who can. Until their information comes to light, I can use my platform as the new editor of the Newsleaders to share my connections to Joshua Guimond’s disappearance to contribute to raising the case’s visibility.
I don’t want anyone to have to write another letter 20 years from now.
Nikki Knisley, by the way. Nice to meet you.
